PS - BTW, in the gladitorial games of Rome, a thumbs up from Caesar meant "Kill him" and the a thumbs down meant "Let him live." Hollywood generally gets it backward.

Not quite. Thumb down, as if stabbing the fallen gladiator meant death. The sign for mercy was "thumb hidden". The thumb was covered by the fingers.

Haha. Where did this tangent come from?

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PS - BTW, in the gladitorial games of Rome, a thumbs up from Caesar meant "Kill him" and the a thumbs down meant "Let him live." Hollywood generally gets it backward.

Not quite. Thumb down, as if stabbing the fallen gladiator meant death. The sign for mercy was "thumb hidden". The thumb was covered by the fingers.

I've been over this with many scholars of Latin and Roman history as well as art historians, and collectors of gladiator movies. Then there is uneducated modernpop culture. Unless I see convincing evidence to the contrary, I'm going with this:

Thumbs down, signified “swords down,” which meant the loser was worth more to them alive than dead, and he was spared apparently so he could make up for his disgrace the next time he appeared in the arena. Keep this in mind the next time you give someone the “thumbs up” sign.

Our reverse interpretation of this custom apparently was the result of the work of the French artist Léon Gérôme who apparently understood the Latin verso ("turned") to mean "turned down", and therefore in his painting Pollice Verso (1873), he presents the death sentence with the thumbs-down gesture.

The painting became so popular that Gérôme’s mistake became the accepted interpretation and it is unlikely that it will ever be changed back to the meaning that it had with the Romans.

Scholars before Gérôme gave support to the view that “thumbs down” among the Romans, meant the hapless gladiator was to be spared, not slain.

The gesture meant "Throw your sword down". A 1601 translation of Pliny equates the gesture with "assent" or "favor", and John Dryden's 1693 version of Juvenal's Satires gives the thumb being bent back, not down, as the death signal.

I have seen support for your hidden thumb as meaning mercy but thumbs up seems to clearly have meant "Kill him." The stabbing motion is an upward one from the gut to the heart.